


Boot Marks Where You'd Been (The It Never Ends the Way We Had It Planned Remix), Part 1

by norgbelulah



Series: Boot Marks Where You'd Been [1]
Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Criminals, F/M, M/M, Multi, OT3, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-06
Updated: 2013-02-10
Packaged: 2017-11-28 09:06:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/672667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/norgbelulah/pseuds/norgbelulah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Raylan forgets, Boyd wishes he could escape the memory, and Ava always remembers something very important.  Through the hills and the hollers and the ever present sun and sand of Miami, these three are drawn to each other, and they'll do anything to hold fast.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [It Never Ends the Way We Had It Planned](https://archiveofourown.org/works/297178) by [norgbelulah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/norgbelulah/pseuds/norgbelulah). 



> First in a three part series. Remixed from another of my fics. Basically, an AU of an AU.

_That night, Boyd seemed as happy as Raylan, though Ava had only ever seen him frowning before. The boys joked, touching each other briefly on the arm in some semblance of roughhousing until they slowed to nearly a stop and Boyd said something that made Raylan’s head jerk back and his limbs stop moving all together._

_Ava watched, breathless, as Boyd stepped forward, his back still in the direction they were headed, and caught Raylan up in his arms, dragging their lips together with a swift force that Raylan obviously hadn’t been expecting. The moon disappeared behind a cloud and the boys melted into each other, pressing themselves together so that they merged into one long shadow to Ava’s eyes._

_She blinked rapidly, wishing the light back, and despairing as she saw them separate and walk slowly away. She couldn’t see their faces, and was almost glad. She wasn’t sure what she would see there, whether she wanted to know._

~#~

_That night, as they walked back to his house, Raylan knew that Boyd had gone hard in the swimming hole, but he dismissed it, and he’d thought everything was fine. Until Boyd said, “You gonna ask me if my prick is still hard, Raylan?” and then didn’t even give Raylan a chance to answer before pressing their lips together._

_The kiss was a heady thing, strong enough to get drunk off, and Raylan felt that immediately. He didn’t pull away, but he didn’t lean in either, letting Boyd take and give what he wanted._

_When they drew apart, Boyd didn’t speak. He just let Raylan go and turned, started walking again toward the house. Raylan followed him, asking quietly, “What do you want to do now?” Fearing and hoping they were thinking the same thing._

_“I don’t know,” Boyd said, just as quiet, like he hadn’t been expecting the kiss to be what it was, like he’d thrown down a challenge and got himself back a mystery.  
_

 

“Ava, this is my brother, Boyd,” Bowman says, all boyish grin and playful eyes. “He’s shippin’ out to Basic next week. To the Army. Isn’t that great?”

Ava feels her smile fall and can’t bring it back up again when Boyd Crowder slips his hand into hers, a firm grip and a loose smile. He’s looking at her like all the other boys do, like she’s so pretty he can’t imagine where she came from.

“It’s lovely to meet you, Miss Ava,” Boyd says softly.

They’re all standing near to the big bonfire in the low hills at the rear of the Crowder’s property. Pickups are parked all around in a big ring, headlights and car radios adding to the boisterous atmosphere of the party. 

Kids from Evarts High School are chugging beers and slugging shine around. Though the party’s only been going for about a half hour, many of them are already drunk, or well on their way.

Boyd might be the oldest one there, and Ava wonders if he would have bothered to come if Raylan Givens hadn’t left town just two weeks before. She sees loneliness in his eyes that she imagines wasn’t present when Raylan was around. 

Bowman’s obviously pleased to introduce his brother to such a girl as Ava, but his smile falls away as well when she doesn’t let go of Boyd’s hand. There’s curiosity in Boyd’s expression and Ava pushes herself to speak. “It’s too bad there ain’t much time for us to get to know each other, Boyd.” She looks right in his eyes, ignoring the tightening of Bowman’s hand on her arm, and adds, “I feel like we got a lot in common.”

Boyd quirks an eyebrow, but he’s not smiling anymore as he replies, “Do you?”

Bowman pulls her away then, not at all politely, throwing a dirty glance Boyd’s way and twisting too hard at Ava’s arm. Boyd watches them walk away, and she catches his still-curious eye.

Ava goes with Bowman for a while, until he parades her around to a few more people and she hisses at him that they aren’t dating yet and even if they were, she wouldn’t take to being shown off like a prize pig at the 4H show.

When she sees Boyd heading for his truck, she slips away, running fast as she can across the field in her heels. Boyd sees her and stops with the door open, watching her frantic approach. 

“You okay?” he calls.

She’s breathless when she reaches him, bringing her hands up to rest on the door. There’s a half-open car window between them as she says, “Your brother’s an asshole. All he wants is for the upperclassmen to see how pretty his date is. Will you take me home?”

Boyd smiles again at her and something warm sits low in her stomach. “You speak the truth, milady. Climb aboard.”

They drive in silence and Ava fidgets with her fingers, shakes her foot around nervously. She feels Boyd’s eyes on her every once in awhile, but she doesn’t quite know how to say what’s in her mind.

 _I saw you kiss Raylan. I think we both love him._ Ava knows that won’t go over well.

“What is it you think we have in common, Ava?” he finally asks. “I mean, I don’t like to be rude, but I never met you before today and I don’t think you heard enough about me around town to tell. Unless you were jus’ tryin’ to make Bowman mad.”

Ava smiles. “Well, I guess I succeeded in that venture. Though I wasn’t really aiming to. I...” She trails off and he looks at her again. There’s patience in his eyes that she’s never seen in Bowman’s, but something brooding and dark too, that she could see over-taking all the rest. “I can’t say,” she finally admits.

“Why?” he eyes are on the road, but his voice is light, like he’s starting to think she’s just jerking him around.

“You wouldn’t like it.”

At that, he turns to her. “Excuse me?” he asks slowly. They run up to a stop sign, the one just down the hill from her Gran’s house. It’s funny, because Boyd must know more than he let on about Ava, since she didn’t tell him where to go. “You can’t just tell someone something like that and not elaborate. What are you playing at?”

He doesn’t move the car again, waiting for her answer. There’s no one else on the road.

Ava’s starting to breathe hard. She doesn’t know what she’s doing, only what she wants. With the anger brewing up in Boyd’s gaze, she’s not so sure she can get it now. She wonders if she could ever have gotten it. “I don’t know,” she whispers, tears threatening. “Never-nevermind.”

Boyd sighs, not soft enough she can’t hear him. “Ava, honey, how old are you?”

She lifts her chin. “Sixteen.”

“Only just, though, I expect.” His eyes are understanding and she sort of wants to hate him, but then she thinks of Raylan.

Ava looks away and tugs down on her skirt for some reason. Boyd pulls across the intersection and up the hill into Ava’s Gran’s drive. “How’d you know this was where I’m livin’?” she asks.

“Bowman said somethin’ about it. And... you know Raylan Givens?” There’s a sad hesitance in Boyd’s words and Ava feels like crying again, though she only nods. “His mama knows your Gran, I expect you know that, too. Mentioned it when I was over once. I was sorry to hear ‘bout your parents.”

She looks up at him and she knows her eyes are big, it’s the way she looks when she’s holding something in, something big. Bowman told her once it makes her beautiful. She didn’t tell him back, most times she looks like this at him because she’s pissed.

“I thought you said you didn’t know me,” she says.

“I said I’d never met you. And that you didn’t know me.”

“Maybe you’re just as mistaken as I was.” Ava licks her lips and sees him steeling himself to refute her. She speaks again before he can. “Let me write you.” 

He just stares at her, like he doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

“In Basic, in the Army. You have anybody to write to? Let me be your penpal, Boyd.”

He blinks when she says his name and his brows furrow. “Why would you do that?” he asks in a disbelieving tone.

“See if we do having things in common,” she says with a smile that he hesitantly returns.

“All right, Ava. To this address?”

“Yes, sir,” she intones and he laughs. 

Ava makes herself bold and kisses him on the cheek, with thanks for the ride, before she gets out of the pickup. She doesn’t turn back as he rolls down the drive, taking the direction that winds up to the Givens’ house.

She hugs a pillow to herself that night in bed and tries not to wish for things she can’t have.

 

The first thing Boyd sends to Ava is his address, on a postcard from his base in Georgia. He sees no sense in writing anything of value, if she won’t write him back. He realizes she’s caught him in his little test when she sends him a box of food--cookies her Gran’s baked, candy she must have found out from Bowman that he likes--and a four page letter, detailing not just the events of her life, but work they’re having her do in school and a movie at the drive-in Bowman dragged her to. 

She writes, _Bowman used to complain to me when you were in town that you had your nose in a book more often at home than not. Are you getting time to read? I can’t believe the base has much of a library, or much you’re interested in. What can I send you?_

He smiles when he writes back, on small, plain stationary he picks up from the grocery near the base, that he’ll read anything. But whatever she sends him, she has to read first, so they can talk about it. So they’ll have things in common.

He tells her a little about his schedule, how the boys in his unit are all hillbillies like him, but only one or two is half as smart. He can imagine her laughing at that, and draws a little smiley face next to the line in the margins of the paper. He doesn’t elaborate much, signs the letter and mails it before he can think about it too hard.

Ava complains in her next letter how difficult it is to find two copies of some kind of interesting book, one cheap enough to send, and the other either from the library or from somebody else. She does enclose a beat-up copy of _The Sun Also Rises_ , writing in a note slipped in between the first pages, _they’re making us read this in English class. I stole a copy for you, shocking, I know._

Boyd’s read the book before. He went on a Hemingway kick shortly after high school, when he didn’t know Raylan too well and had been spending a lot of his time alone. He reads it again for Ava and finds his thoughts on it have changed. Themes of want and desire beyond what can be gained and kept pull at his thoughts and his heart too much for comfort. They put him in mind of things he’d hoped to leave behind him. 

When Ava writes to him about her frustration with Jake and Brett, with their easy capitulation to the futility of their predicament. All he can write back to her is, _She just isn’t the way he needs her to be._

For some reason, she sends him a non-fiction book next. It’s something political and she hates it, so he forwards her twenty dollars out of his pay in his following letter and tells her to buy them something she wants to read.

He laughs out loud when she sends him a brand new copy of a Scottish Romance novel, complete with grocery store price tag sticker and man-with-kilt on the cover. In her note, she writes, _Tell the boys you’re participating in your mother’s book club by mail._ She draws a smiley face with it’s tongue stuck out real big at the bottom of the note. He threatens to stop sending her money.

They do this for all of Basic and while he waits to find out his deployment schedule. Things move quickly in August, when Saddam invades Kuwait and everyone knows where they’re going. He only has a few minutes to write out the address his commanding officer has given them for mail and the words, _Apparently going to war_ , on a postcard and sends it off to her.

The next thing she sends him is a magazine, Southern Living, funnily enough, with the message, written in a shakier hand than usual, _Took this from the library. You’re turning me into a thief! I’ve read it already. Don’t know if you’ve got time for books._

After things go fast, they turn real slow for a while, as seems to be the nature of war in this day and age. They wait on a base in Saudi Arabia for months, before they move into Kuwait, and the gulf is a hot, flat, place that seems to hold no joy in it at all. So, he has plenty of time for books. 

Ava sends him more and more, enough that she doesn’t have time to read them all, with school and her cheerleading, and getting ready for beauty school half-time in the spring. So he writes to her about them. He likes the early 20th century authors, Hemingway still, but also Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and most of all Maugham. 

He tells her there’s something lovely in these novels, about the wanting and waiting each character undergoes, before their tragedy or their triumph. He wants to tell her he feels the same way about his life now, waiting for some kind of shoe to drop, the knowledge that everything he really desires is beyond his reach. Except, Ava already seems to understand that. He wonders how she knows and is grateful for her regardless.

He does see some action, though it’s over almost as fast as it begins. He doesn’t like the way it shakes him. 

He kills his first man, though he could have done that easy in Harlan, too. He doesn’t like to think about how it happened. It was senseless and stupid and he hates it. He’d rather it had been over drugs, or money, or pride, anything but another man’s orders. He doesn’t write to Ava for a week.

He’s cleaning out his gear, an hour back from patrol, when his Sergeant yells from the door to the barracks, “Crowder, phone call.”

The first thing he thinks is his Daddy’s died. Someone got him, maybe one of the whores he keeps around and treats like shit, or maybe one of the thugs got too big for his britches. He reaches the phone and says, “This is Boyd Crowder.”

He doesn’t recognize her voice right away. It’s small and quiet, strained over a line dragging across half the world. “Boyd?”

“Ava--” he’s surprised enough he about coughs up her name and then she’s crying.

“Boyd, Boyd,” she chokes into the phone. “Boyd, you can’t do that, oh my God.”

His stomach has dropped to his knees in a hard little ball of self-loathing. He can’t believe he didn’t think about this, didn’t consider her at all. “Ava, honey, don’t cry. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I won’t, okay? I won’t.” He leans up against the wall, presses his forehead against it, and closes his eyes. All he can hear are her tears falling. “Please, baby, stop crying.”

“Did I,” she sucks in a breath, lets it out. “Did I say something wrong?”

“No, no, Ava. It was me. I... I sincerely apologize,” he replies shaking his head. He keeps his eyes closed, shutting out everything but the sound of her voice.

“Are you all right? Oh my God, Boyd, are you?” she speaks like she’d only considered he might be dead, not wounded.

“I’m fine, really. Well, things got a little heavy, I suppose. I wasn’t... I should have thought of you, Ava, and I didn’t.”

“Boyd,” she says his name like she’s going to cry again and he can’t take it. 

“I won’t do that again, I’m telling you. Please.” He doesn’t know what he’s asking anymore.

“You’re lucky,” she says through a laugh that sounds like a sob, “that you’re only half as big an asshole as your stupid brother, Boyd.”

“I am,” he agrees. “I’m so lucky, Ava. I know.”

She takes another breath, deep and calming and he takes one too. “You’re gonna come back,” she tells him. “And we’re gonna talk about some things, okay? We got a lot to talk about.”

“Okay,” he says, because he knows that too. Has for a long time.

“Goddammit, Boyd,” she cries and hangs up the phone.

He stares at the receiver in his hand long after she’s gone. 

 

He goes from base to base in the Gulf for the next two and a half years and he continues to write back and forth with Ava. They send him stateside for leave just once, but he doesn’t go home. There isn’t enough time to get in and out of Harlan and take care of all the things he needs to there. He tells Ava so in one of his letters and she writes him that she’s pissed, but that she understands.

In their letters, they never write of the things Ava said they would talk about, but it always seems to be there, just under the surface of the ink on the pages. Boyd wants to keep it that way, until they have time to talk and think and act.

They finally give him his discharge, telling him all the while what a great leader he could be, how all the boys look up to him. He stares every one of those officers in the face and tells them he won’t take any more orders from the United States government after his tour is through. He is done and they aren’t going to change his mind.

They send him home a week later.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Boyd comes home.

Ava is with Bowman the day Boyd comes back into town. 

She hangs around with him because somehow he makes her feel closer to Boyd. She doesn’t have many other friends in Harlan, most of her girlfriends left after high school and most of her beauty school friends and new coworkers got married and had babies. 

So she laughs at Bowman’s stupid jokes, makes nice with Johnny and his dad, sends shy smiles Bo Crowder’s way, just because that’s always a good idea, and waits for Boyd to come home.

It’s not the way she would have planned it, but he gets to Harlan faster than he’d led her to believe he would. 

They’re just hanging out at Johnny’s. Bowman’s still pretending they’re together, though the only two times she slept with him she was drunk, the second time with the added encouragement that she was pissed as all hell at Boyd for making her worry. 

He’s got his hand on her leg and she’s wondering how long she’s going to wait before she shakes it off when someone yells, “Hey, Boyd Crowder,” from a table near the door. Ava nearly drops her glass. She turns and there he is, sunshine from the outside illuminating the air around him, making his face dark and unreadable in the doorway. 

“Hey, Cousin,” Johnny, who just got back from the Army himself a few weeks before, calls from behind the bar, comes around fast and takes Boyd’s hand. Ava sees the whiteness of Boyd’s teeth as he smiles, but no spark in his eyes. His short hair is growing in already just a little. He’s not wearing Army gear, just a pair of dark jeans and a buttoned up shirt. He looks thin and she doesn’t like that.

He talks soft enough to Johnny that she can’t hear what he says, but his Cousin smiles real big and disappears into the back, presumably to go find Bo. Ava doesn’t know why Bowman hasn’t gotten up to greet his brother yet. She’s still sitting because she can’t seem to find any strength in her legs.

So they both turn to him from their seats as he walks further into the bar. Bowman shifts himself like he’s going to say something, but stops when it’s obvious Boyd only has eyes for Ava.

She lets him speak first, taking a long breath and settling her shoulders. They look right into each other’s eyes and she doesn’t know what Boyd’s seeing, but in his she sees everything he ever put in his letters. She sees every hope, every doubt, every desire, and she sees Raylan there, too. She knows she loves him.

“You been with Bowman,” he says. He’s not asking. He sets down his bag at her feet where they dangle, red-clad as usual, from the bar stool where she sits. 

Bowman shifts again and makes a protesting sound, but he’s silenced with a raised hand from Boyd. Ava shivers.

“Sometimes,” she answers and knows her eyes are huge. She’s holding everything back. She’s not sure how much longer she can.

He leans forward, pressing his hand to the bar at her shoulder, but he doesn’t touch her at all. There’s something dangerous in his eyes, some banked fire that threatens to rise up into a blaze. “You ain’t gonna be with him no more, are you?”

“No,” she agrees. “Not anymore.” And he smiles.

She throws herself at him. 

He catches her up in his arms, lean and strong, and she wraps her legs around his waist. She loses a shoe, but she’s past caring, because she’s in Boyd’s arms and she must be crying or something because he’s soothing her, whispering her name. 

She presses her face to his neck, where it meets his shoulder, and breathes him in. He smells of sweat and dust from the road. She wonders if he hitchhiked home, walked the last few miles.

His hands are in her hair and they travel down her back as she scrambles up on him, pressing herself closer. She’s forgotten where they are.

Someone grabs at her arm, trying to pull her away. Boyd sets her down fast and puts an arm in front of her, lunging forward to push his brother back.

“Jesus, Boyd. What the hell?” Bowman growls, back pressed up against the bar.

“You don’t get to touch her again, Bowman,” Boyd says deadly quiet. “I remember how you treat your women.”

Ava had never let Bowman hit her, though it had looked like he wanted to on more than one occasion. But he could be mean sometimes, and knew how to say just the right thing to make her feel like shit, like no one would want her but him. She would have let herself believe it, deeper and longer, if it hadn’t been for Boyd and their letters.

“Bowman,” she says, trying to keep her voice down, so he doesn’t lose too much face. “We weren’t never together for real. I told you that, honey.”

He swings at her, apparently too angry to form coherent words, and Boyd steps further between them, grabbing Bowman’s fist and pushing back on it roughly.

“Hoo boy,” Bo Crowder’s booming voice comes from the back of the bar. “You boys takin’ shots at each other already? I feel like we time-traveled back ten years or so.”

Boyd steps away from Bowman almost instantaneously and seems to be standing at something like attention as Bo approaches.

“Miss Ava,” Bo says to her in a somewhat mocking tone and Boyd stiffens. He eyes his father warily. 

“Daddy--” Boyd begins but Bo cuts him off.

“You made yourselves quite a scene, here, children.” Ava and Bowman both look away, but she sees that Boyd doesn’t. He keeps his eyes on Bo and his hand wrapped around Ava’s wrist. She loves that he hasn’t let go.

“I apologize, Daddy.” Boyd finally gets his word in. “This was not the appropriate time--”

“But you just couldn’t wait, huh, to steal your brother’s girl?”

Boyd smiles like he wants to call his father an idiot, but is too polite, and too smart, to do any such thing. He says, “That’s not exactly what’s happening here.”

“Care to enlighten me, son?” Bo Crowder, as usual, is tall and imposing. Boyd looks slight beside him, but he doesn’t look intimidated. 

“It’s my understanding, Bowman was a little confused regarding the status of his relations with Ava. I ain’t stealing anything, isn’t already mine, Daddy.” Boyd’s voice is strong, sending another shot of shivers up Ava’s spine and across her shoulders. He squeezes her wrist.

Bo looks at her. “This true?”

She looks at Boyd and smiles, carefully avoiding Bowman’s glare and replies, “Truest words I ever heard spoken, Mr. Crowder.”

“Jesus Christ,” Bo swears, like he’s just resolved a school-yard brawl, and pulls Boyd roughly to him in an enormous embrace. 

Boyd makes a huffing noise that shouldn’t sound so close to a sob and Ava tries not to look at Bowman quietly seething beside them. 

“Get outta here,” Bo orders, pushing Boyd away affectionately. “I’m sure you got plenty to do elsewhere, son.”

Boyd takes Ava’s hand again and she gladly lets him pull her towards the door. Stooping slightly to pick up her lost shoe, she leans against him to slip it back on and turns her eyes away from Bo speaking to his younger son. She only catches the words, “fish in the sea,” before Boyd opens the door to the bar and leads her out of there.

He kisses her for the first time, there in the middle of the street.

 

Ava puts him and his gear into her little jeep. He tells her his truck has been idle at his Daddy’s house for four years. He’s not sure it will run anymore. He doesn’t really care too much. There’s always a glut of vehicles around Bo’s place.

“Where do you want to go, Boyd?” she asks. There’s a tremor of excitement in her voice, and maybe a hint of apprehension. 

He looks at her and marvels again that he could have forgotten how pretty she is. The sun’s shining on her golden hair and she’s wearing a slim little sundress in a sky blue flower pattern. The shade matches her eyes, which are big and staring straight at him, as she sits behind the wheel.

“Anywhere you are, Ava,” he says and she laughs. “I’m serious.” He starts to laugh himself. He loves her so much. It hurts him to think that the last time they spoke face to face, he didn’t know her at all.

She seems to come to a decision, her head pulls up a little higher and she straightens her shoulders as she pulls out of the lot at the bar and heads off in the direction of Raylan’s house. 

Boyd tells himself he needs to stop thinking of places in Harlan in terms of Raylan Givens. It’s a bad habit that just makes him ache in a different way than he ached for Ava, or ached for home. It’s helpless and hopeless and it does nothing for him. He looks over at Ava and makes himself smile.

“Last we spoke, Ava, you said you had things you wanted to talk about,” Boyd says. 

Ava takes a breath and answers, “I did.”

“Was it more than we just resolved in front of everyone in that bar?”

“Yeah, Boyd, it was.” She’s turning up the road towards Raylan’s, no, he thinks after a second, this is where her Gran lives too.

“I want to talk to you about something,” she says in a low, uncertain tone as she parks the car in the drive outside her Gran’s place, the last place he’d seen her before the inside of his Uncle Johnny’s bar. “Show you somethin’, too.”

He lets her pull him out of the car and lead him to the road. His chest tightens when he realizes where he is, the same place he was the night everything changed.

 

“Ava, what are you...” Boyd trails off as Ava pushes him around muttering, leading him up and down the side of the road. “It must have been here,” she says, trying to remember, to place him right where he was. “No. Here. Right here, Boyd.”

“What’s here, Ava,” his voice is cautious, like he’s not letting himself believe he might know what she’s about to say.

“Right here,” she smiles sadly, “is where I saw you kiss Raylan.” Boyd shudders, like the memory is too much for him, and his eyes go far away. He’s facing her, but he’s not seeing her, and she just keeps talking. “You were standing right where I am. And he was standing where you are. And you were talkin’ and laughin’ and then you stopped. You must have said--”

“You gonna ask me if my prick is still hard, Raylan?” Boyd whispers.

“ _That’s_ what you said?”

“It was a dare. More to myself than anyone. I was hard at the swimming hole. It happened sometimes. But Raylan noticed and he got so weird about it. And I thought... I’d see what he’d do. So I asked him, and I didn’t wait. I just kissed him and then...” He blinked at Ava.

“And then?” she prompted, weaving their fingers together and squeezing just a little.

“Ava, how did you know? Why...” he can’t seem to find the words for the questions he needs to ask.

She smiles and points to the house, at the window she’d looked out of that night. “That’s my room, Boyd. I heard you walkin’ up the road. I knew it was Raylan because I... then, I thought I loved him. And I saw you, you looked so fine and happy and then you kissed him and the way he looked, the way you looked, so pleased and surprised. I could see the way you loved each other.”

Boyd backs away, shaking his head. “But we didn’t. Not like you and me. He--”

“What happened, Boyd?”

“Arlo saw us. Not... not doing anything, but he assumed some things. He called me--It doesn’t matter. Raylan told me to get out, before I was there long enough for Arlo to remember it, so I... I listened to him. I ran away.”

“Oh, Boyd,” she sighs. She tries to pull him closer, but he holds her at a distance.

“Raylan didn’t look at me the next day. He looked, lost, afraid. I didn’t know what to do, I was so scared and ashamed, Ava, why do you want to know about this?”

“Because it led me to you. I talked to you, I wrote to you because I saw the way you loved each other... No,” she said, putting a hand to his down-turned face, pulling it up and making him look at her. “Don’t run away from this, now, baby. I saw the way you loved him, and the look on his face, Boyd, I don’t know what happened, but he loved you, right then and there. _I saw it_. And I wanted it. I wanted to be a part of that. It was--it _is_ beautiful, Boyd.”

Boyd just shakes his head at her, less of a denial now, and more of a quiet protest. “I’m glad you know, Ava. I don’t want to keep things from you. I’m glad you love it so much, but I can’t see it that way. With Raylan, Ava, I don’t even remember what that was, compared to what I’m feelin’ now for you. It was so long ago, so confused. It’s nothin’. I don’t care to think on it, all right?”

He finally lets her pull him into her embrace, and she hugs him hard, pressing him close, for a long time. He takes her comfort with a sigh, and she whispers, “Okay, baby. We’ll save it.” 

She presses her hand to his heart and he curls his fingers around hers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is only the end of Part 1. The entire series is completed and will be posted ~about~ once a week until complete. Thanks must go to a cadre of beta readers that I have thrust this story upon in the YEAR since I began it: rillalicious, thornfield girl, engage_protocol, and scioscribe. Thank you, ladies! <3


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